energy was three. six, seven and eight was all about taxes, and the loss of capital, the growth of business, and tax code complexity. i mean, those are -- those are important issues for the small businesses out there. no question about it. like to know something about what's going on. >> okay. so we go -- let's say that this is resolved, that what we have facing us, some way or another, do you expect that it will come off of these lows that you're seeing? >> well, i think that we'll have to see how the economy evolves. since 80% of the declines in the index was about expectations for business conditions, and poor expectations for real growth, and your sales, that means that the small businesses are going to sit tight. they don't expect more customers so they're not going to hire, and that, of course, showed up. all the other components of the index stayed at recession levels. here we are at this very, very low level of optimism, consumer optimism tanked along with the owner optimism. and a lot of them